Before the New Criticism: Modernism and the Nashville Group

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During the early 1940s, the Nashville group and the New York Intellectuals began what would become one of the most powerful literary partnerships in the country. In Creating Faulkner's Reputation (1988), Lawrence H. Schwartz claims that they created "a cohesive ... literary movement" that had "palpable cultural authority."(1) The central function of this coalition was, as Schwartz sees it, to produce a "postwar aesthetic" that would serve the needs of U.S. hegemony and Cold War politics.

In my view, this collaboration also helped the Nashville group to develop a cover for its politics, specifically, through its theory of the New Criticism. That is, the formalist precepts of the New Criticism helped the group to distance itself from Agrarianism's proto-fascism. To establish this point, I will look closely at the Nashville group's work up to (and including) the New Criticism and reveal its politics in somewhat rawer form.(2) As we will see, the group appropriated modernist literature in its efforts toward legitimization.

The collaboration between the New York Intellectuals and the Nashville group centered around their work with the Rockefeller Foundation.(3) Beginning in 1943, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, and R. P. Blackmur joined forces to get the Humanities Division at the Foundation to "support contemporary American literary culture" (Schwartz, p. 80). W hat they really seemed to be looking for, though, was financial backing for the journals they edited: Partisan Review (Rahv), Kenyon Review (Ransom), and Sewanee Review (Tate). The argument they used was that the future of U.S. literary taste and achievement depended specifically on these three journals, which Ransom and the others saw as having the same basic mission: to cultivate an elite class of writers, critics, and readers who could in a sense justify the claim of the U.S. to world leadership. This artistic and intellectual excellence would be presented as the result of democracy and freedom. As it considered these arguments, the Foundation appointed two panels to recommend journals for funding. A smaller panel would represent the interests of, and report back to, a larger one. Blackmur, Trilling, and Malcolm Cowley were chosen to sit on the smaller panel.(4)

The panel quickly determined that it needed to present the foundation with a coherent, unified--and fundable--theory of literature. What they ultimately "put forward," Schwartz says, was "a formalist aesthetic" that "advocated a solipsistic modernism." As it functioned in the coalition's aesthetic theory, formalism was, according to Schwartz, "a way to evade the world and, in the guise of avoiding the explicitly political, to give the appearance that there were no underlying political criteria for literature" (pp. 138-139). This theory proved to be persuasive: in the late 1940s, Schwartz points out, Kenyon Review and Sewanee Review would receive grants of $22,500 and $27,600 respectively (pp. 121-124). Partisan Review, though, would be passed over until the mid-1950s, until the Rockefeller Foundation was fully convinced of the journal's anti-Communism (p. 137).

Given the relative success of their first joint venture, the New Critics and the New York Intellectuals decided to work together on other, bigger, projects with the Rockefeller Foundation. Their next collaboration eventually led to the establishment of the Kenyon School of Criticism in 1948.(5) Trilling, Ransom, and F. O. Matthiessen submitted a formal proposal for the school, arguing that graduate study in English was stuck in an outmoded historicist model; literary texts were being ignored (especially if they were modernist). The Rockefeller Foundation responded with a $40,000 grant. Theory of Literature (1949),the influential textbook by Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, was intended to lay out the theoretical approach and philosophy of the Kenyon School.

Partially funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Theory of Literature made the case for "intrinsic" criticism and against "extrinsic" criticism.(6) "Intrinsic criticism" was basically a descriptive term for the formalist technique of the New Criticism: critics should look at such textual elements as phonetics, metre, metaphor, and imagery. Seen together, they expressed the internal logic of the poem. Indeed, Wellek and Warren argued that literary texts actually had a "special" ontological status, although the explanation of this point by the authors was not altogether clear or convincing.(7) "Extrinsic criticism," on the other hand, was reductive. It saw literature as completely determined by outside factors, "outside" referring to anything beyond the actual text. These external forces could be the biography or psychological condition of the author, or larger social and historical events. Within the extrinsic model, exegesis was unnecessary; there was no meaning to be found in the text itself. The book jacket for the third edition (1962) would describe Theory of Literature as a "classic of criticism that examines the nature, function, form, and contents of literature, rather than the environment that influences its creation" (my emphasis). In the preface to the first edition (1948), Wellek and Warren spoke of themselves as, in a sense, recovering historical scholars. They had done "work in the `history of ideas'" and come to the conclusion that "literary study should be specifically literary" (p. 8).

Wellek and Warren concentrated their arguments against the extrinsic style in their chapter entitled "Literature and Society." Their approach was rather canny: the authors did not overtly base their critique on ideology but on the principles of logic. Marxist criticism, for example, was accused of offering an "irrationalistic explanation" of how literature and economics were interrelated, but it was scrupulously not accused of being "unAmerican" or labeled with any other Cold War epithet (p. 108).(8) Socially oriented criticism, the authors said, should simply be rejected because it was doomed to fail at its own objectives (as defined by Wellek and Warren). …

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